With spring seemingly arriving and the smoke and shouts of student protests apparently fizzling out, it was time last Saturday to take a saunter down to the Goodman Gallery for an opening.

Kate Gottgens is South Africa’s master hunger artist. No one has better conveyed the crack and the hollow that fissures and empties experience.

Letters, hand-written, stamped and posted, are archaic throwbacks to a culture we nostalgically dub ‘slowness’ – slow food, slow beer, slow sex, slowed down hand-made things. The art gallery however has remained largely immune to this threat to slowness.

Two dissimilar, and each in their own way engaging exhibitions in Johannesburg, engage with the mythic figure of Battiss, a big-hearted adventurer and nonsense-maker from an era known for extreme baloney, and worse.